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- Hacker News
- I suspect these AI-displaced workers in the long run will suffer the same fate as workers affected by deindustrialization. They won’t die of starvation, obviously. But they will never be “retrained” to roles that offer them similar income, status, and leverage over employers. Instead they’ll be sucked into an ever-expanding economy of service work.by rayiner
- >They won’t die of starvation, obviously.
Narrator: This was not, in fact, obvious.
by selimthegrim - > But they will never be “retrained” to roles that offer them similar income, status, and leverage over employers. Instead they’ll be sucked into an ever-expanding economy of service work.
Which will probably depress wages of service workers - unless somehow there is a dramatic expansion in service demand, which apart from particular industries (i.e elder care), seems unlikely.
by danans - I'm trying to remember which Marvel capeslop movie it was where the kid gets a bunch of Oracle professional-grade computer hardware or something as a gift. Larry makes a cameo, of course. Maybe it was Iron Man 2?
Like, mate, if you want to be a superhero in real life, stop laying off thousands of people and working the remaining people ragged. That's all you gotta do.
by lenerdenator - 14 hours ago 6 commentsby Cider9986
- What's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market? Maybe know how specific for the market but at least 20K people with know how on this business are available at this moment.
I'm inclined to believe that its no longer the case of employees being replaced by AI but simply those businesses being replaced by AI and the current businesses who were able to benefit from AI are reaping the momentum they have but eventually this will end.
by mrtksn - A bit premature I think. Right now it is employees making room for AI investmentsby cm2187
- > What's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market?
Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.
by WoodenChair - It's a move I would only wish on my worst enemy. Good riddance to themby conartist6
- What's even weirder is the Founder of canonical has a #hiring badge on their LinkedIn profile. What kind of message is that?by ramon156
- They are hiring. I've seen one role listed for more than a year, and it's because of their hiring process. Here's a random job, by way of example: https://canonical.com/careers/3433732/application Search for "how did you perform", and be baffled at their recruitment strategy.by trollied
- Fire and re-hire from a desperate pool of anxious workers who will accept any offer to escape unemployment.by desultory
- Tech CEOs suddenly love blaming AI for mass job cutsby lordluca
- I think a lot of them have drank the kool-aid. They go to conferences and then some talking head from one of the AI companies gets on stage and tells them things like they don't need developers and how AI is already good enough to revolutionize the world. They buy it hook, line, and sinker and then do stuff like this.
- It is the latest fad. They blamed other fads for job cuts in the past.by bluGill
- IMO it’s not sudden, the AI excuses have been gradual and ramping up for a couple years now.by angoragoats
- You can’t read the headlines, they’re marketing like anything else. Companies are free to spin them however they want and journalists are happy to write them however they will scare you the most. Those are the only truths.by eagerpace
- I’ve just been thinking about this and would like to ask those of you with more experience in the industry: do you prepare yourselves in any way for crises? Do you have any techniques for dealing with uncertainty?
Let’s say someone is entering the IT job market today. How should they prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood, starting a family, buying (perhaps on a mortgage?) their first flat, and planning for a family? I’m not writing solely in the context of AI layoffs but broader. Over the last 10 years that I’ve been in the IT industry from EU/US perspective, I’ve perceived the market as economic cycles, the sine wave of which has narrowed significantly (more often markets demands changes and instability) and accelerated in the past years.
by __natty__ - Nope, you just get up every day and do your best. If the ghouls at the top decide to axe you, then that's their loss. Humans have existing far longer than capitalism, we can survive without a boss.by delusional
- There's really nothing special about the current situation. Throughout history, jobs have been rarely anything close to guaranteed.
You save a good deal of cash for emergencies, live below your means, keep your skill set up to date and face the world.
by glimshe - Live within your means. Save aggressively. Invest wisely.
(Source: I'm one of the 21,000, let go via a 6am email after 15 years with the company in engineering and management roles.)
by cbm-vic-20 - These things certainly are not industry specific. I grew up in construction where layoffs are expected sometimes a few times per year. The basic personal finance advice helps, i.e. emergency fund, pay off high interest debt asap. Not burning bridges, building a network of real people is huge. Help people out when you are in a position to and are able to. As far as mindset, I think my Christian faith plays a big role in situations that might cause suffering. Essentially, don't make your career or your salary your identity and/or highest power in your life.by sqircles
- The only sure thing is to live significantly below your means as often as possible. Becoming accustomed to life as a peasant when you could live like a king is what makes you economically bulletproof.
I can go for a decade without another dime coming in the door. If I started using DoorDash and Amazon Prime every day, I'd last maybe 18-24 months. Just barely treading water is actually a great position to be in. It keeps you honest and any amount of work you do find on top of that feels like a windfall. An extra $500/m is a lot if you can make it happen consistently.
by bob1029 - Now is precisely not the time to cut jobs, but to invest in people's usage of AI. You have domain expertise, and you are going to burn tokens trying to replace people's jobs, but the AI revolution is not at all about people replacement, its about a change of paradigm. Watch them closely rehire thousands of new employees (who won't have the domain expertise) once they see that you actually need people to operate their company :)by GL26
- I easily do more than x 5 the workload I did in 2020. Replacing an employee with domain knowledge (only thing valuable now), with someone with zero domain knowledge is corporate suicide in 2026.
However, if you are oracle sending out consultants with zero domain knowledge around to help.... I would rather just use claude.
by ransom1538 - What I don't get is why these companies are in all the rush to replace people with AI tools. Stuff is changing so fast that capital investment right now will just need to be reworked on after a few years when things settle down a little.
And that is not even considering how much it costs to run AI right now at scale AND retraining people to use the new tools AND possible disruption in existing workflows.
If I was running a large org I would actively try to slow down AI adoption in most areas until there are clear established solutions.
by DanielHB - Depends on which jobs; at a big enough scale you have people who are so deep in the hierarchy that their real connection to the domain is low.
Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept.
That being said, I haven't seen many layoffs that actually seem directly AI related, because the main effects are not hiring junior Devs, and not outsourcing to low cost/skill areas.
- Oracle overcommitted on behalf of OpenAI, taking on debt to meet their obligations. Not that healthy companies are not also doing ridiculous layoffs, but in this case, Oracle does have to do some drastic things to get out of this tailspin.by breckenedge
- For those curious, this is a report about firings from the last year. Not a new round of layoffs:
> Oracle shed about 21,000 roles globally in the last year as the US technology giant reshapes its business around artificial intelligence (AI), the firm's latest annual report shows.
by jabedude - None of this is due to AI. That’s just the cover story that stops the stock crashing. The reality is the market is contracting and it’s doing that because the extraction and monthly financial models are hurting other businesses which are also contracting because of lower customer demand.by cryo32